Day: May 18, 2009

Here’s my new Perl programming blog. I have another blog where I talk about a number of different things, but I like to keep my Perl writing separate from the rest of it. Until recently I kept a Perl journal over at use.perl, but the technology behind that site is looking pretty dated so I thought it was worth striking out on my own. So here I am at PerlHacks.com.

It might be interesting to explain how I came to own such a cool domain. It’s a story that has some useful lessons about the kinds of scams that people try to pull on the internet.

It managed to get perlhacks.org in 2005, just because no-one else had thought to buy it. But someone already had the .com and, even though they weren’t using it for anything, I suspected that they’d want a lot of money to part with it, so I didn’t even bother contacting them.

Then in September of last year, I got an email from someone offering to sell me the domain. They contacted me as I owned the .org and they assumed that I’d like the .com to go with it. They wanted just under $1000 for it, so I ignored them. Over the following few weeks, I got three or four more increasingly desperate emails from them. All of which I also ignored.

At the end of October, I got a different mail. In this one, they dropped the asking price to $99. That was closer to the price that I wanted to pay, so I investigated further. I mentioned the mail on the london.pm IRC channel and someone pointed out that the domain had, in fact, lapsed and was available for anyone to buy.

There was a brief race as three members of the channel tried to register the domain at the same time, but it was a race that I won. I got the domain for less than £10. I took great pleasure in pointing out that fact to the people who were trying to sell it to me for $99. They never replied.

The lesson is, of course, to always check whether you can buy something cheaper than the price it’s offered at.

So there I was with both perlhacks.org and perlhacks.com. And now they both point to my Perl blog.